Getting your site to not look like Drupal

Session Overview
Drupal is a great platform to build websites and web applications, with a lot of basic and advanced functionality that works out of the box or with little knowledge of how it really works. However, there are cases where you need to create sites with a unique look and feel, from the general design down to the little details, details with a finer grain than what you could achieve through the administration interface provided by Drupal core and contributed modules.

In this presentation, we’re going to take a closer look at the different ways that Drupal can be customized in every little detail, using clean code and maintaining a clear upgrade path making maintenance and further development not only easier but also more stable. Since this process involves both php programming and css design, and it is quite rare that one person is expert in both, we’ll take a closer look at the best ways to improve the developer-themer interaction. Although this presentation is based on the one we gave at the Bay Area Drupal Camp, it has been completely reworked to take into account the invaluable feedback that we have gathered.

In addition to the usual time for questions, there will be some time at the end of the presentation for people to share their most useful tips regarding customisation.

Goal:

• Custom Design (theme)
• Custom Behavior
• Usability improvements
• Custom little details
• Clean code
• Clean upgrade path

Prerequisites:

• knowing drupal (site administrator)
• knowing php (developer)
• knowing css (themer)
• communication skills, because work is distributed among different people

Agenda:

• Visual design and planning
• Functional design and planning
• Establishing standards and naming conventions
• Setting up the Layout of our theme
• Setting up the basic configuration and the structure of the information
• Create custom functionality as needed
• Create theme templates for individual elements
• Visual and functional details for better usability
• Performance improvements